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Windows Wine Linux Games

You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play (tomshardware.com) 106

Posted by msmash from the growing-synergy dept.
At the end of August, Valve announced a new version of Steam Play for Linux that included Proton, a WINE fork that made many Windows games, including more recent ones ,such as Witcher 3, Dark Souls 3 and Dishonored, playable on Linux. Just two months later, ProtonDB says there are over 2,600 Windows games that users can play on Linux, and the number is rapidly growing daily. From a report: When Valve Software launched Steam Play with Proton, it made it easier for gamers to play Windows games that hadn't yet been ported to Linux with the click of a button. Not all games may run perfectly on Linux, but that's also often the case with Windows 10, which can not play older games as well as previous versions of Windows did, even under Compatibility Mode. In only two months, the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600 -- more than half of the 5,000 Linux-native games that can be obtained through the Steam store.
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You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play More

You Can Play Over 2,600 Windows Games on Linux Via Steam Play

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  • Microsoft should sue (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:28PM (#57556197)

    Steam is illegally stealing Windows and letting cheap freeloading Linux losers play Microsoft's games! They should sue!

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      obvious sarcasm modded down?
      RIP

    • That's ok, Windows now comes with complete built-in Linux distributions (under Windows Linux Subsystem) allowing freeloading Windows losers to do work! He should sue!

  • But... (Score:3)

    by eneville ( 745111 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:47PM (#57556321) Homepage

    Linux already has solitaire and minesweeper.

  • Not the right metric. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Holi ( 250190 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @12:52PM (#57556371)
    Not a fair metric when 90% are crappy clones of each other.

    Better metric would be, how many games that I want to play work on Steam on Linux, I promise you the number is far, far lower then the Hackers Quarterly.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by arth1 ( 260657 )

      Not a fair metric when 90% are crappy clones of each other.

      This is unfortunately so. I am sure there are people who will be thrilled that they now can get several times as many visual novels and badly made side scrollers, but I'm not one of them.

    • Re:Not the right metric. (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Greyfox ( 87712 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @01:39PM (#57556659) Homepage Journal
      The number is much higher than the previous status quo. Remember the bad old days of Loki Games? That was the late '90's, so some of the younger readers might not have been born then. I bought several of their titles back then. They did a Linux convention in Denver in '99 and their CEO was complaining that it took three engineers three days to figure out how to set up a multi-display X11 setup for a flight simulator. They finally threw in the towel a short time later.

      Back then, the prognosis for commercial games on Linux was "Whoever wants to port them and Loki." There weren't many who would port them -- Id Software for some of the quake titles are the only ones I can think of. And sure, there were some other options -- you could install mame and play some emulated coin-op and console games. There were some open source ones, graphical and not. There was still a pretty healthy Xtrek community back then. But if you wanted a machine to play games on, you installed windows. Funnily, OSX was in pretty much the same boat as Linux. A few more publishers decided to port to them. But you didn't really buy a Mac to play games anyway. And they were really terrible at pushing 3D. The early aluminum tower would cook the video card to death over the course of a couple of months if you actually tried to.

      Fast forward to today, you can confidently install steam on Linux and reasonably expect a new title to just work. Take No Man's Sky. Good example, fairly recent game, pretty unique, works great. Borderlands 2, Stellaris, Factorio, even the old Railroad Tycoon 2 work great, for just a random selection that I have installed on my laptop. About the only thing I've tried installing that absolutely didn't want to work was the 64 bit version of Skyrim.

      And a lot of the titles that didn't work before work great with wine. I used to run the 32 bit Skyrim that way. Wine will also run Wow and Eve online flawlessly, again a huge step up from the bad old days.

      I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that. If that works even remotely well, I could consider formatting Windows 10 off my gaming system and installing Linux instead. That would have been impossible before now.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Calydor ( 739835 )

        While things are better, your post also points out a really big problem: An AAA title with the kind of hype Skyrim had doesn't work, at least not if you want to run the 64 bit version. Once people hear about that, and hear that the games have a 100% chance of working in Windows ... which system are they going to choose? Going with Linux is all well and good right until you need to have a Windows machine ANYWAY for the one game you want to play with or at the same time as your friends.

        And if you're booting i

        • And if you're booting into Windows anyway for that game, may as well continue doing so for other games to avoid breaking up your workflow all the time.

          Booting Windows means I have to expect my game may be interrupted by Windows Update deciding it's a great time to apply updates.
          Windows Update is what is breaking my workflow

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Kjella ( 173770 )

          Going with Linux is all well and good right until you need to have a Windows machine ANYWAY for the one game you want to play with or at the same time as your friends.

          This. For solo games I got a backlog of games I could play and most games work eventually and in the end it doesn't affect anyone other than myself. But when my friends swoon over some new AAA game then I have to join in on that. Heck, I'm getting a PS4 almost just to play Red Dead Redemption 2.

        • No sane person is claiming linux is a better gaming platform.

          However, is it good enough to let you play more games than you ever have time to finish unless you have absurd amounts of game time?
          Hell yes.

          And it's getting better every day.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Calydor ( 739835 )

            Which again doesn't matter much if they're not the games you WANT to play until several years later when no one else is playing them anymore and they don't provide something to talk about with your friends.

            Just because you have access to an endless supply of French art noir movies doesn't mean you have a lot of movies to watch on Friday night.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 )
          The 32 bit version of Skyrim also works well both with Wine and Proton. If you only have one machine and want to run Linux, you at least have some gaming options now. For me, it's good enough that I don't need to dual boot back to windows for anything anymore. Valve seems pretty committed to making gaming work on Linux, so I think the situation can only improve from here. At some point I think there'll probably be a tipping point where developing a game on Linux is actually easier than doing it on Windows a

      • I still need to test it with the HTC Vive VR and my most commonly played titles for that.

        Oculus had a sale where they sold the whole setup for like $400 or $500 or something absurdly low. Despite running the original Oculus on Linux, apparently, the latest incarnation is specifically prohibited from running on Linux. And they wondered why VR isn't hitting it big: They don't allow you to do what you want and it is locked down tightly for monetization purposes. TL;DR on why VR isn't taking off is GREED.

        I have used the Steam VR support. It is pretty good. I am betting with the Vive, it will be fin

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by Greyfox ( 87712 )
          We have more time in The Lab than any other VR game, by a solid factor of 5. My room mate loves the bow and arrow game. It's a pretty decent workout, too. 30 rounds of that thing and I'm pooped. I'm currently having a problem that neither of my original Vive controllers want to charge anymore, though. I'm probably going to have to send them off to be fixed :-(

    • Re:Not the right metric. (Score:4, Insightful)

      by TheSunborn ( 68004 ) <mtilsted@NoSPAm.gmail.com> on Monday October 29, 2018 @01:40PM (#57556667)

      Now I don't know what kind of games YOU want to play. I guess there might be an issue with missing games if you like 3d shooters since a lot of these seems to be missing.

      But all the games I personally want to play, such as XCOM2, Civilization 5 and 6, Darkest dungeon, Thea, Total war: Warhammer, Cities: Skylies and rim world and Factorio are available.

      Only game I sometimes miss are "Endless space 2" and there are repports that it does run perfectly on Wine but i have not tested that.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by McLoud ( 92118 )

      Better metric would be, how many games that I want to play work on Steam on Linux, I promise you the number is far, far lower then the Hackers Quarterly.

      How about some citations on what you might want to play? Everything I like to play is there, even titles I'm still considering buying since I still didn't manage to play everything me and my gf own together. And theres is like all recent eldes scrolls except maybe the MMORPG thing, all tomb raider, thief, all of the witcher, planetary annihilation...

    • Do you want to list some game you want to play on Linux that don't, or just talk in sweeping generalizations? Because a few of my "regular" games play quite nicely under Linux with the Linux Steam client.

      Rocket League
      Borderlands 2 and TPS
      XCOM 2
      Kerbal Space Program

      etc..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by sad_ ( 7868 )

      what are you on about? steam play/proton plays the same games as you have on windows (that is the whole point).
      so if 90% of that is crap, then 90% of steam is crap and 90% of games on windows are crap.

  • the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600

    But how many of that number are simply variants on hitting something, shooting something or jumping over something?

    While the number of games sounds imppressive, how many of those titles are actually novel or unique and how many are simply variants on the small number of 30 year-old concepts?

    • While the number of games sounds imppressive, how many of those titles are actually novel or unique and how many are simply variants on the small number of 30 year-old concepts?

      I fail to see how this is a critique of gaming on Linux versus gaming in general...

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      the database of games that work with Proton has increased to over 2,600

      But how many of that number are simply variants on hitting something, shooting something or jumping over something?

      While the number of games sounds imppressive, how many of those titles are actually novel or unique and how many are simply variants on the small number of 30 year-old concepts?

      I don't see how your comment is useful or unique. It seems to just be the same simple variation of rearranging verbs, nouns, and adjectives that all comment conceps have been using for the past 30 years.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Calydor ( 739835 )

      How many books are about stuff other than a guy encountering some problems, solving the problems and getting laid as a result?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tukz ( 664339 )

      GTA V runs on Steam Play Linux, that seems to fit your "hit something, shoot something and jump over something".

      The new Tomb Raider runs well too, is that a recent enough AAA title?

  • Actual Proton Page (Score:4, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday October 29, 2018 @02:18PM (#57556931)

    For those that want to look at the ProtonDB site.

    https://www.protondb.com/

  • A surprisingly high number of good games (Score:5, Informative)

    by mykro76 ( 1137341 ) on Monday October 29, 2018 @08:45PM (#57559327)
    For those labouring under the assumption that these counts are inflated with crappy games, I collected some stats on the 4500 best games on Steam. These are the ones that Steam flags as "Very Positive" or "Overwhelmingly Positive" based on aggregated reviews. Of those, 1500 are supported natively on Linux and another 1500 are playable without much trouble in Proton. It's also become clear that most of the reports being submitted to ProtonDB are for the better, well-known games. Hardly anyone is submitting reports on the crappy shovelware games.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Tukz ( 664339 )

      Valve, together with DXVK, have made significant stride the last few months. It's really astonishing.

      In same vein, applications like Lutris and layers like DXVK are really pushing gaming on Linux forward right now.

      It's still Linux, so some tweaks are still required, but it's not nearly as cumbersome as it used to be.

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